Quite a few conservatives, beginning maybe with George Will, are saying that the victory of Trump would be the end of conservatism. Others, maybe beginning with Damon Linker, are saying that the nomination of Trump signaled the end of conservatism. There are many ways of evaluating such claims. Here’s one.

Justice Thomas' masterful dissent in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt skewers the Court's arbitrary use of rational, intermediate, and strict scrutiny tiers of review used in evaluating different constitutional rights.
Justice Clarence Thomas has written two significant opinions concerning abortion. Seventeen years ago in his lengthy dissent in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), he denied that there is a constitutional right to abortion; he called Roe v. Wade (1973) “grievously wrong” and insisted that nothing in the Constitution “deprives the people of this country of the right to determine whether the consequences of abortion to the fetus and to society outweigh the burden of…

The particular danger of conservatives’ turning to the courts to pursue preferred outcomes, even constitutional ones, is that doing so legitimizes the same strategy by constitutional liberals, who will—it bears repetition—sooner or later reassume control of the levers of judicial power. The time for warnings may soon give way to a season of regret: The liberal judicial ascendance is begun.

The kind of extremism on display on the Planned Parenthood videotapes and in the reflexive closing of ranks around the group—whose own leadership has done more to disavow its grotesqueries, or at least the depictions of them, than have its political supporters—is the product of Roe v. Wade, but not for the reasons commonly supposed.

This Liberty Law Talk is with political scientist Justin Dyer on his latest book, Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In debates over the legality of abortion common opinion has focused on the connections between the legal treatment of slavery in the nineteenth century and the contemporary status of abortion as a fundamental right. Dyer takes this debate as his starting point but goes much deeper by showing the layers of constitutional, political, and philosophical meaning linking slavery and abortion in the American experience. This conversation covers the ground of the Dred Scott opinion,…

Roe v. Wade remains, for us, the most contentious decision of our Supreme Court. Here’s the advice of our Supreme Court: The opponents of Roe should get over it. In its opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court explained:

Where, in the performance of its judicial duties, the Court decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe and those rare, comparable cases, its decision has a dimension that the resolution of the normal case does not carry. It is the dimension present whenever the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution calls the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.

The rare, comparable case that the Court highlights in Casey is Brown v. Board of Education. Reversing Brown and restoring the constitutionality of segregation would throw the nation into confusion and chaos. And that means that Brown has “rare precedential force.” The burden of proof that could lead to its reversal is more severe than other precedents. It would require “the most convincing justification.” The Court claimed to authoritatively resolve the controversy that produced a national division by binding the country together through a common constitutional mandate.

by Alejandro A. ChafuenMarjorie Grice-Hutchinson (1908-2003) played an important role in bringing attention to the contributions to economics of late medieval Spanish scholars, particularly the “School of Salamanca.” In Early Economic Thought in Spain,…

by Stephen R.C. HicksMoney is funny, the old saying goes, both in the cognitive puzzles it generates and the motivational extremes of human behavior it causes. The anti-liberal theorist Karl Marx ascribed these…

About

The Online Library of Law and Liberty’s focus is on the content, status, and development of law in the context of republican and limited government and the ways that liberty and law and law and liberty mutually reinforce the other. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law and Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.